


this isn’t a sex thing

by Prim_the_Amazing



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, F/F, Gen, POV Rose Lalonde, POV Third Person, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Past Tense, me @ me: thats basically canon, me: what if vriska was a huge gross mess, still confused about which category pale romance is in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 17:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10223879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: Rose Lalonde met the biggest, hottest mess she’d ever encountered in her life that wasn’t her mother when she was eighteen. That person just so happened to be her new roommate. She was moving away from one disaster and immediately signing a contract to share her living space with another one the second she got the opportunity. This didn’t say good things about her ongoing debate with Dave regarding how bad her mother issues were.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oriflamme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/gifts).



> You have no idea how hard it was not to write this in second person present tense. I accidentally slipped into it *literally every paragraph*. Never doing that again.

Rose Lalonde met the biggest, hottest mess she’d ever encountered in her life that wasn’t her mother when she was eighteen. That person just so happened to be her new roommate. She was moving away from one disaster and immediately signing a contract to share her living space with another one the second she got the opportunity. This didn’t say good things about her ongoing debate with Dave regarding how bad her mother issues were.

She vowed to herself to never sleep with Vriska Serket because she hated losing and Dave currently had the upper hand in their miles long pesterlog, and also she had self respect. She’d be willing to eat her headband if Vriska hadn’t had a yeast infection for several years and just either hadn’t noticed, didn’t care, or didn’t even know that wasn’t how vaginas were supposed to be. Her hair went past her hips so she ended up sitting on it whenever she sat down, and it was so greasy it looped back around and almost looked shiny and washed, and it was so tangled that Rose actually went out of her way to see if Vriska even _owned_ a comb. It was around the time she was unscrewing the vent covers that she had to admit to herself that no, she definitely didn’t.

Rose actually had to become the kind of person who wore her shoes indoor because the floor-- _all_ of the floors-- were covered in pointy dice, broken eight balls, and god knows what. Plates from meals half-eaten months ago lying around and growing mold. Stained clothes. Peeling wallpaper. _Is this performance art_ , she wanted to flatly ask.

“Also I have some tarantulas, so don’t be a scaredy-cat about it,” Vriska said smugly as she messily shoved the signed papers into a drawer.

“Where’s the tank?” she asked.

“Oh, they’re free range.”

What she was plotting had been obvious from the start: get Rose to contractually agree to paying part of the rent for a year, and then chase her away within a week so she wouldn’t have to share her living space with someone. A quick Google search brought forth Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Craigslist posts and even Yelp reviews desperately warning her not to move in with Vriska Serket don't do it good god please don’t do it it will be a living hell. Personally, she had a hard time believing the woman had managed to trick anyone in the first place with her poker face. She was practically rubbing her hands together with malicious glee. Well, it was a big, wide world full of billions of people. There was bound to be some incredibly gullible people in there somewhere, somehow.

And of course then there was Rose herself, who was willingly and knowingly agreeing to this, partly because she hated herself, but mostly because living a day to day life in a house in which she _wasn’t_ in a constant contest with her fellow cohabitor sounded utterly foreign. How would she be able to relax if she wasn’t plotting against the person closest to her?

There was a reason Dave was winning the debate.

“That’s lovely,” she responded with her sweetest smile. “I hope they’ll get along with my cat.” _And perhaps maybe get unfortunately eaten._

Vriska frowned at her. “I’m sure they will,” she said with a not even subtle threatening tone. Rose cheerily pretended not to notice.

* * *

 Rose would resent basically being someone’s live in house maid except for the fact that it was so clearly unwanted.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Cleaning up, Vriska. You’re welcome.” She roughly scraped the last of the moldy food into the garbage bag and gently placed it in the sink.

“I was going to eat that later!”

“You would have died, dear.” Vriska bristled at the condescending petname. She was so easy to read, so different from her constantly softly smirking mother. She’d never been able to tell when she’d actually gotten in a hit, or if she’d even ever had managed to do so once. This was kind of nice. Easy mode.

“Oh well excuse me, but just because you have the constitution of a fainting maiden doesn’t mean I do!”

“I’ll make you some cookies,” she said, mockingly mollifying.

Vriska hissed and spat, and just all over generally made a huge fuss about it, and Rose skillfully ignored her. She debated with herself whether to deliberately make disgusting cookies or annoyingly perfect ones. She remembered that time she’d caught Vriska eating literal raw ground meat in the middle of the night by the light of the open fridge, sitting down on the kitchen floor in her oversized boxers and nothing else, and decided that she might as well go with the latter.

* * *

 “Well, you can’t go out like that!”

“Why the hell not!?” Vriska looked down herself.

“You’re wearing a wifebeater and a pair of shorts.”

“Well done, Sherlock.” She seemed to debate doing a sarcastic clap for a moment before opting for the lazier and more direct middle finger.

“It’s snowing.”

“So?”

“Hang on, I’ve got something for you.” Rose had been looking forward to this for a while now. She ran into her room and came back, glad to see that Vriska hadn’t taken the opportunity to just leave. She roughly shoved the sweater over her head and she yowled, hands trapped at her side. She struggled with it for a long minute before her arms popped through the sleeves.

“I made it myself, just for you.” Rose put on her best ‘I’m just a kind, sweet, naive girl’ face. She doen’t think Vriska bought it. Maybe it was because Rose knitted her a sweater that said 8LUH 8LUH HUGE 8ITCH across the front.

She looked down it for a long moment before… blushing? “How’d you know I like eights?”

Rose stared at her for a long, dry moment. “I _have_ seen your number eight tramp stamp, Vriska dearest.” Initially she’d thought it was an infinity sign, but it became pretty obvious what it really was after a while. Only eight plates, eight shirts, a random huge eight drawn in someone’s old, crusty blood on the living room wall, etc. What a strange, fascinating obsession. Rose wanted to study and analyze her for years.

“Yeah, well, whatever,” she grumbles and leaved. She didn’t slam the door behind her like usual for some reason.

* * *

 TT: Something that’s been bothering me ever since I first spoke to you has reared it’s ugly head yet again.

TG: is it oh shit i think i might be exclusively attracted to sword slinging puppet hating rappers what a tiny demographic this is terrible

TG: because

TT: No, Dave.

TG: boo

TT: It’s about the problem of dedicated irony.

TG: okay you just said the word irony im back in the conversation and so is dave junior

TT: At what point does something you’re doing ironically become sincere? If you make someone an excellent batch of cookies, is it because of a certain persona you’re ironically portraying as an annoyingly perfect, sweet girl, or is it because you want them to eat well for once?

TT: If you spend hours knitting them a sweater, is it because you’ve knit a hilarious insult on it, or is it because you’ve noted that they never dress for the weather?

TT: If you notice some of their quirks on your own, is it because you’re gathering intel for your barbs, or is it because you’re genuinely interested in them?

TG: hey so totally off topic hows that not fucking your mothers clone doing

TT: Very well. Someone who reeks like they fell asleep in a dumpster is still not what gets me going, apparently. Also, just because she’s a disaster doesn’t mean she’s anything like my mother. There are wildly different kinds of person-disasters, Dave.

TG: of course of course my bad

TG: well to no ones fucking surprise i actually spend basically all of my time over thinking irony

TT: How masturbatory.

TG: yeah that too

TG: and anyways the answer ive come to is that it super doesnt fucking matter so long as youre having fun and looking cool while doing your sincere slash ironic business since it all blends together after a while if you do enough of it hard enough anyway

TG: if youre just having fun but not looking cool however its time to abort the mission and go undercover in mexico for the rest of your life or some shit

TT: I’m glad you have your priorities in order, brother.

TT: But I’m afraid that if what you’re afraid of is looking uncool then you’ve got a long overdue plane to Mexico to catch.

TG: ooh lalonde burn

* * *

 Rose was the queen of escalation, it was her.

“Um,” Vriska said. She felt a brief flash of pride at temporarily making her speechless. “Sorry, but I’m not into freaky albinos that can’t mind their own business.”

“I’m not an albino,” Rose said, standing as naked as the day she was born in front of her roommate. “And this isn’t a sex thing.”

“Well, move then, because you’re blocking the bathroom. I’ll piss in the cat litter again, I swear to god.”

 _Again_ , Rose doesn’t ask, because she had an excellent poker face. “Of course,” she says instead. “Come inside.” And she moved out of the way, further into the only bathroom their shitty apartment had.

Vriska glared at her before walking inside. “You think I won’t piss in front of you? Because I’ve pissed in front of _judges_.”

“Yes, I read the article about that last week. You’ve led a very exciting life, Vriska.” Rose went and turned on the shower, letting the water run until it’s hot. She turned around to see that Vriska didn’t even have her pants down yet. She knew it’s definitely wasn’t because of any sort of bashfulness, so she silently raised an eyebrow at her.

“What’s your game, Lalonde?” she asked accusingly.

“Please, call me Rose. And the current game I’m playing is in fact called ‘get in the fucking shower this instance so I can try and detangle the greasy rat’s nest you have on the top of your head’.”

“What?”

“Do you have any idea of what I had to go through to get this shower clean, Vriska? The things I saw?” For a second after she’d gone rooting through the shower drain some weeks ago she’d thought she’d retrieved a huge clump of Vriska’s hair, but then it had _twitched_ and she recalled that Vriska probably hadn’t taken a voluntary shower once in her entire life. Jasper had eaten well that day.

“Why?” she asked, bewildered.

“Because you never fucking clean anything is why.”

“No, why do you want to clean me up??”

“It’s just _so bad_ that I have to. Also, I live with you. You reek.”

“So?” she asked. “I’ve been like this forever, and my mom and all of my other failure roommates didn’t care. Well, my failure roommates moved out, but that’s besides the point. They didn’t take their clothes off and try and take a platonic grooming session shower with me.”

 _Your mom didn’t try and clean off the sewer aura from you_ , Rose didn’t ask, because she didn’t say a lot of the things that she thought. She guessed that she wasn’t the only person in the bathroom who had mother issues, then. Something inside of her went strange and soft at that thought.

“Well, I’m not a failure roommate. I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m your success roommate who’s going to live with you until the day you either die or get a restraining order because I never lose.”

She narrowed her eyes at Rose. “Are you saying _I’m_ going to lose? Because Vriska Serket is a fucking winner!”

“Oh yeah? Then stop being so afraid of taking a little shower--”

Vriska was _really_ good at taking her clothes off really quickly, and Rose tried not to read into that too much. The water was nice and comfortably hot, and the shower wasn’t actually too tight of a fit. Vriska had been wasting this apartment. She scrubs herself down herself, after Rose poked and prodded at her for a while first of course. She gave Rose an incredulous look when she handed her a washing cloth and body soap, but she was beyond a quick rinse at the moment, so she silently insisted. She amused herself by counting Vriska’s various tattoos and piercings while she washed. They all added up to eight, naturally.

“I’ll take care of your hair,” she told her, before reaching for the comb she’d bought. Vriska’s shoulders tensed, but Rose made sure to be careful as she worked the knots out. By the time she was finally done the water had actually started to cool some, but Vriska was at least apparently relaxed. Rose squirted out a handful of rose scented shampoo (Rose was as the pinnacle of comedy here) and worked it gently into Vriska’s scalp and long locks of hair. She leaned into it subtly.

By the time they were done Vriska was basically a human puddle, the water was starting to grow uncomfortably cool, and Rose’s fingers were pruning up.

“See, wasn’t that nice?” she commented conversationally as she dried her hair with a towel she’d had to buy herself because Vriska lived like she’d never lived somewhere before. “Let’s do this again some time, since you clearly barely knew what you were doing.”

“I always know what I’m doing,” she grumbled.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” she said. “But that’s okay, because I’ll help you do the things you don’t know how to do, which seems to mostly be everything that has anything to do with taking care of yourself. I can take care of you.”

Vriska squawked and flailed some at that.

“And I’ll have fun and look cool while doing it,” she said, mostly to herself at that point. “So it doesn’t matter if I’m not sure _why_ I’m doing it.”


End file.
